"Grunge", for me, is as much a name for a particular time and place (a history and a geography) of music, as it is a name for a genre of music supposedly defined by a recognisable set of characteristics.

I don't really think of Mudhoney and Dino Jr as grunge, for instance, because I knew them before the media event called "Grunge" or "Seattle" happened. I used to call them something else — probably fuzz pop or fuzz rock, which are themselves not terribly helpful or accurate terms. And even though heaps of the other bands now associated with grunge had one or two or more albums out before 1991, I mostly didn't know those bands until the grunge explosion. (I knew "About a Girl", but hadn't heard anything else by Nirvana.)

Same goes with Pixies, but I think more than a few people would lump them in with grunge, particularly on account of Nirvana ripping them off (so to speak).

So, you say the word "grunge" to me and I think of the Pumpkins first and foremost, followed by Nirvana's Nevermind and whole bunch of hits: Would?, Nearly Lost You, Jesus Christ Pose, Pretend We're Dead...

yet Mudhoney always will be pretty much the definition of grunge to me. They were the first of those seattle bands to really break in this country. I think Mark Arm is meant to have been the first person to coin the term 'grunge' as well.

After Soundgarden and Alice in Chains started to build up steam in the late 80s, Nirvana and Pearl Jam blew the whole thing into the stratosphere in the early 90s. Then pretty much ALL American guitar bands populated by 20-30something year olds with long greasy hair got lumped in with grunge (eg Smashing Pumpkins; L7; Babes in Toyland, Hole) even if they'd been going for years already completely independently of any grunge scene (eg Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth), then of course you got the bandwagon jumpers (e.g.Stone Temple Pilots; Silverchair; Bush). Subpop became so synonymous with the whole grunge thing that pretty much anyone who released with them got called grunge too. Then of course you had the noise rock thing going on simultaneously (eg pretty much anyone who released on AMREP) with several of them being called grunge at the time too (e.g. Helmet)

a lot of it comes down to the geography of reception. In Aust., Mudhoney never really had much of a profile, even after the early-90s explosion. By contrast, Gish and the Lull EP came out around the same time as Ten and only a few months before "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Jesus Christ Pose". The national "youth" radio network did a lot to help develop the myth of grunge, even before SLTS went ballistic, playlisting all of these tracks and talking the whole thing up, with little recognition of where it all came from (the network's new playlisting policy at the time was to focus on new music).

Alternative music was going through a really diverse & interesting phase until those tedious long-haired fuckers showed up. Yeah, Nevermind was an undeniably exciting album, albeit a highly derivative one (Replacements + Pixies), but apart from that...nah.

But i've probably listened to them more often than Nirvana since then.

Also, I remember watching this on tv (and had it on a video with loads of other stuff), my telly must have been so shit as it sounds a million more times awesome than i remembered.
http://youtu.be/QjZI4i6qDH0